“... candidate for measurement) Fothergill says, ‘I think you must be Mr J.M. Barrie,’ to which Sir James, ‘slyly’, says: ‘You are not far wrong.’ Harold Acton, with his ‘Big Ben’ voice, presides at the last dinner of Oxford’s banned Hypocrites’ Club, which ends in much goat-like leaping about, the sort of conduct which would not have been ...”

“... is that he seems barely to adjudicate significance; he’s like a child who has taken Henry James’s injunction to novelists – ‘be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’ – literally; he appears to just write down everything he can recall (and he appears to recall everything). It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle ...”

“... his first serious income as an artist came from the stained glass windows he began to design for James Powell and Sons in the late 1850s. He turned out hundreds of such designs over the course of his working life, most of them for Morris & Co. In a frenzy of mourning after Morris’s death in 1896, he ‘flew at his work’ – the phrase is Georgiana’s ...”

“... by the standards of the day – was an international success, and was praised by Proust, Joyce and James; but his poetry was not much read, and he himself (or his reputation) not much liked. In France, where he lived from 1910 to 1915, he was seen as a phoney and a sponger. ‘He is a child,’ the novelist René Boylesve said; ‘he gives himself away with a ...”

“... behind the lectures was the advocate Henry Home (soon to be elevated to the judicial bench as Lord Kames), a sharp reminder, not least to Smith’s modern-day devotees, of the significant role played by patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, nepotism thrived in the academic dynasties of Scotland’s university towns. Not that merit was ...”

“... Thomas Babington Macaulay – later Lord Macaulay, and ‘Tom’ to Catherine Hall – was the most influential of all British historians. Sales of the first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom ...”

“... Sharon and his ministers promptly buried the report. Zertal and Eldar make clear that the settlers lord it not only over the Occupied Territories and their subject population but over the state of Israel as well. It is important to remember that the majority of Israel’s settlers are driven not by ideology but by economic and quality-of-life ...”

“... Assuming the name Alice Dubois, she was trained by British intelligence and worked under Lord Cameron running a network which provided information about military emplacements and airfields. Eventually caught and sent to Siegburg prison, she led a strike in protest at having to assemble munitions parts, and died in 1918. For a while she was a French ...”

“... their appointment bowed to the logic that would soon be spelled out by the republican theorist James Harrington, who remarked that England could be governed only through a nobility or an army. The traditional intermediaries between the Government and the shires, the Lords Lieutenant, had succumbed to the pressures of the Puritan Revolution, and so military ...”

“... and occupied her life in those dimensions has been greatly extended, not least by the work of James Carley and others who have looked at the books which Anne and other members of her circle, including her brother George Boleyn, owned and, presumably, read. This makes up in some measure for what is irretrievable. Anne left no diary, few letters. We have to ...”

“... large numbers of the Indian population. Men like Alva Ixtlilxochitl, the brother of the ‘natural lord’ of the Mexican state of Texcoco, or the ‘Inca’ Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Spanish father and an Inca princess, wrote eloquent histories after classical models to demonstrate how much the indigenous people had done to make the Spanish conquests ...”

“... the accused. As if to show what a bad idea it was to annoy the state, the wholly apolitical James Kantor was held in detention as an act of revenge for his (highly political) brother-in-law’s escape from jail. Above all there was Percy Yutar, the deputy attorney-general of the Transvaal and the state prosecutor. Yutar, the regime’s ...”

“... given birth to a son and was shown to have had several lovers. The Daily Mirror had a photo of Lord John Russell ‘In Women’s Guise’ after evidence had been heard about his cross-dressing, and the Express (owned by the moralistic Beaverbrook) had a picture of the baby under the headline: ‘Who Is My Daddy?’ It was a feast, all the more so because ...”

“... was earlier posed, as she acknowledged, by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov and by William James in ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’. Ishiguro’s novels pose versions of it too, if not with such immediate horror.In Never Let Me Go, for instance, the child isn’t alone, and Kathy and her companions aren’t miserable. Their lives are ...”

“... vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around 250 sailors and ...”